Sunday, December 30, 2018

The Fundamental Principles of Joseph Smith's Egyptian

I feel that I am wrapping up my research on this subject, and I wish to leave my blog and paper up for future researchers to profit by, should they choose to take it seriously. And I want to document a few things as I come to a close in this research, so this will serve as sort of a summary of the most important points.

The fundamental principles of Joseph Smith's Egyptian are these:

(1) The hieroglyphics that Joseph Smith employed in his Egyptian are not containers of information at all. There is no information in them to translate. They are decorative artwork chosen to go along with content. If you can understand this point, you can understand why these symbols do not "translate to" the content. They merely accompany the content. They are recycled symbols from other documents.
(2) The information in the content in Joseph Smith's translations does not come from the papyri that he had in his hands. The source of that content is from non-extant, ancient documents.
(3) The linkages between the content that Joseph Smith produced and the symbols that were chosen and paired with them are ancient Egyptian puns of various types. In other words, every pair formed by symbol and content in English constitutes a pun of some kind. These puns can be seen by reverse-engineering the Egyptian meaning of the symbol and comparing that with the English content paired with it, and then the puns become apparent.
(4) Ancient people produced the content, and created the puns that link that content with the symbols Joseph Smith used by assigning each symbol with the text that accompanies it. The extant evidence that the content is ancient in Joseph Smith's productions are the puns themselves, since the Egyptian originals for the content are not available.

If you can internalize and become very familiar with these fundamental principles, you can begin to understand where I am coming from in every article on my blog. This is why Anti-Mormons and some members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints are wrong when they try to say that Joseph Smith attempted to translate the content from the available symbols in his documents. Because these things form artistic pairs. The symbols do not contain the content. The miracle here is that Joseph Smith successfully produced English renderings of ancient content that is not extant in its original Egyptian form. Whether he did this through visionary or revelatory means doesn't matter much. So, far from being an evidence of fraud that Joseph Smith could not translate, the pairings between symbols and content actually stand as ancient evidence of the reality of this work, when the ancient puns between them are elucidated.